“Höhere Begattung,” “höhere Schönheit”: Goethe's Homoerotic Poem “Selige Sehnsucht”

Summary

The main problem in writing on goethe and “homosexuality” is that many readers will expect his own sexuality to be at the center, particularly since previous books have set the tone. This is particularly true of nonscholarly attempts, but scholars are not immune to the fascination with making Goethe “gay.” It is time, I think, for us to question our methods and assumptions, which necessarily involves taking into account the historical distance between us and same-sex love in the eighteenth century. The effect of ahistorical interpretations is not only that few scholars pay attention to them. For they ultimately detract from the literary texts and what they have to say to us. There has been little attempt to get to the bottom of what should be burning issues, given our own age's conflicts over homosexuality and Goethe's central role in German identity: What were Goethe's views on same-sex love, how did he deal with power relations, the “problem of the boy” (Foucault), the closet, and other thorny issues? And an analysis of these works and his thoughts quickly leads into an area that is essentially ignored in almost all these treatments: Goethe grappled with the ancient Greek and Roman models of same-sex love, in which the desire is one-way, desire of an erastēs for a (usually younger) erōmenos, of a “lover” for a “beloved.”